I feel like I have a deep reliance on society and technology, because I can’t fucking see without glasses and I’m too scared to do Lasik lol (also expensive).
Our modern life involves a lot of reading and writing and sometimes very technical work. But the work of surviving on planet earth is a little less vision intensive: farming, cooking, childcare, handcrafts. Depending on how bad your vision is you might even be slow and shitty at these, but people can adapt to a lot and figure out how to perform tasks they’ve done before, even with poor vision. Look at the blind: they can be functional. Yes there are things like hunting which you could. not. do. with poor vision but that’s why we live in tribes. Someone younger with better eyes will do that while you shell nuts all day.
Eye glasses started showing up around 1300 AD. Implies the basic tech / processes required to make them is relatively simple, given that they’ve been around in some form ever since the middle ages. Granted, they wouldn’t be as sophisticated as they are today, and many people with very niche issues would suffer.
Anything more modern, requiring microchips or heavily integrated international supply chains would go poof. Personally, I’d worry about dental and medical stuff we diagnose with x-rays. Like it’s not too uncommon for people to have a root canal these days… but it didn’t become a more ‘common’ thing until around the 1800-1900 period. Hell, getting your wisdom teeth pulled in a post-event world would likely suck some serious ass.
If there’s that type of event, we (the survivors, that is. 95% of us will die) are going back, way back. When the elevator falls from the 21st century down to the 20th and 19th, the cable snaps and we’re going back to the ground.
See, even a hundred years ago, items like a light bulb or electric motor already depended on a very large supply chain and many people working together that never meet in real life.
How do you make glass? Do you even know what glass is, how many types there are, how to make it different thicknesses or shapes? And even if you can, can you make more for everyone else?
What are you doing in the meantime that you don’t have glass? How are you feeding yourself? With what?
Even if you think glass is “simple”, how would you get the materials and tools? The people who used to do that, where are they? What knowledge have they lost? Where is that material today?
In other words, you’re back to your bare hands and wits and whatever is in walking distance from you, right now.
Think you’ll survive long enough to worry about glasses?
I assumed surviving doctors would do for people what they did for sawyer in lost.
Use what you can find to get as close as you can per eye.
Other than that, sucks to suck, And I say that as somebody who is both near sighted and far sighted.
One would think that if most of society is toast there will be a shitload of left over glasses that could be collected and then distributed to those in need.
I have never put on a pair that was even close to my prescription. In fact, this post made me realize I’ve been wearing my old glasses all day and that’s why I have a headache.
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There are always exceptions to the rule. There are people that have super special prescriptions and then there are other people that just have the standard stuff due to age, etc.
Based on that, the majority of people would have a pair that match them. Anyone else with special glasses would be shit out of luck because as the title says it’s the end of the world and only a few peops left.
Let’s not be ruled by exceptions to the rule. It is only a tiny amount.
Glasses aren’t all the same, you know. What if you have a really crazy prescription?
Out of all the people with glasses in the world, there’s somebody who’s almost guaranteed to have the same eyes.
I know of a YouTuber called the blind homesteader. He has family and friends help him. They have quite the homestead and he often helps the community around his homestead too.
We’re fucked. Our genes told us.
https://www.engineeringforchange.org/solutions/product/adspecs/
Hopefully if enough of these get distributed it won’t be so much of a problem except for people with astigmatism.
https://www.epo.org/en/news-events/european-inventor-award/meet-the-finalists/joshua-silver
Joshua Silver, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford, first had the idea to manufacture adjustable lenses for the poor, removing the need for expensive equipment and professionals, in May 1985 after he had created a variable focus lens out of curiosity.
His invention allows wearers to adjust the glasses to their personal prescription without the assistance of a healthcare professional. They simply look at a reading chart and adjust the glasses until they can see the letters clearly.
The glasses use durable but flexible plastic lenses, which have fluid sacs filled with silicone oil between them. These glasses can easily be adjusted by the wearer by simply adding or removing some of the oil in the sacs.
The invention is not without its limitations, however. Currently, the principle only functions successfully with circular lenses, limiting the design opportunities. Additionally, the principle can only alter the magnification of objects, so the glasses cannot treat those with astigmatism. What these spectacles lack in aesthetics, however, they make up for in spades with utility and work on non-round lenses is already underway.
His stated goal was to make the overall cost of a pair of glasses as low as $19.
Well this is awesome but for me it wouldn’t work. B/C I’ve got an astigmatism.
Same, I have astigmatism and near-sightedness, a brutal combination.
Me too. Hey, ignoring the issue at hand, get weighted toric contact lenses. Just do it one time to try.
When I did, I realized what trash normal lenses are. Getting the lens and astigmatism corrected on the eye results in some pretty dramatically sharp view. It’s crazy, I started observing the stitching on carpets and the hair in the shower. I had never cared for either thing because I just can’t see it normally.
Yeah, my problem is the second you blink they shift away from perfect vision into garbage. It might be because I smoke cannabis. shrug meh, my stupid eyes…
Holy shit this is amazing. I love inventions like this. This just oddly gives me a lot of joy. No need to waste hours on stupid eye exams, just adjust it whenever my eyesight deteriorates.
Awesome! But this probably takes forever to actually become a product that one can buy.
You probably wouldnt want to buy it. They aren’t exactly a good fashion statement.
i think they look pretty cool. kinda steampunky
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/dec/22/diy-adjustable-glasses-josh-silver
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2011/may/22/joshua-silver-glasses-self-adjusting
Original article I posted didn’t give a date, but the earliest articles about these glasses are from 2008-2011, so they’ve certainly been around for almost 20 years now.
I think they were really aimed at rural communities in poor countries, several of the articles I’ve read reference about 300,000 pairs being distributed.
People who wear glasses are screwed but not as screwed as people who rely on medication.
But I’ll thrive with my untreated ADHD (unlikely)!
I dunno, reading through common ADHD traits sometimes sounds like a description of the perfect post-apoc survivor lol
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s an adaptive trait, just one that isn’t useful anymore. It wouldn’t be good for everyone to have ever, but it probably was useful for some people to have. Just like most people are more awake during the day, you’d want some people awake at night to keep everyone safe, so we have “night owls” who are maladjusted to the typical work hours we have today.
I always imagined that ADHD was just our minds tuned to being hunter-gatherer survivors, and thus not suited for a sedentary office environment.
I have trained my children from a young age that, in case of zombie outbreak or alien invasion, I am to be left behind. I require far too many medications to function in a post-apocalyptic setting.
I too am certain to die so my plan is to heroically sacrifice myself. Full on “I got this” while my friends are pulled away screaming “nooooooooooooooooooo!”
I wanted to train my kids to do this, but my spouse rolled their eyes and asked, “Why would we willingly give up a weapon for you to have a last stand?”
Yep! I plan to lead the zombies off while playing a banging tune on my phone.
Mountain Goats are always a good choice.
What oddly specific training. Is there a training regimen for a “Evangelion everyone got turned into Tang” situation too? What about the “Just got spider powers and a Canon event may be coming”?
They were young and zombie movies were everywhere. In the way of all children, the questions were non-stop. This was also the time I was bedridden, so I convinced them that zombies only went after healthy people.
My partner and I have discussed our wildly different willingness to try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world plenty of times over the years. He would work to survive and would probably thrive more than the average survivor. Me? I’ve always said I’ll likely head to the cough syrup section of the pharmacy.
This conversation came up earlier today, in fact. Well, I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I’m still sorting out the right medication to get it under control and am dealing with a lot of pain, but way less than before starting treatment. I told him with this diagnosis, if society ever collapses in a way that causes me to be unable to get my medication? I’m out.
I’m on the same page. I’ve spent most of my adult life testing the limits of my skills, wit, and badassery. My conclusion from that is that I am not a badass and have no interest in trying to survive societal collapse.
I want to see a movie like The Road but it’s kids dragging their parent in an iron lung down the road.
Your screwedness depends on how bad your eyesight is. Can you see well enough to tell a weed apart from the crop you’re growing when looking at arms length? Then that’s all the eyesight you need to be useful to a community
Pretty much this. Even if your eyes are bad-bad, generally you can find a task you can do, even if it’s “go spread fertilizer on the crop beds over here” or “hold this metal down at this end while I hammer the other end into shape.” People with bad eyesight have historically survived in conditions nearly identical to what a commune of survivors would be facing if the T-virus decided to escape tomorrow or whatever, it’s not magic. Depending on the community you wind up with, you will have SOMETHING that you can do to meaningfully contribute even without eyeglasses.
I believe that our eyesight is worse than it’s been historically. Sunlight shows eye growth and we get less of it today than 1000 years ago.
It didn’t really change the point we can be mostly somewhat valuable, but there may be more if it’s with worse eyesight today.
Not that useful in scenarios besides reading: if you curl your hands in front of your eye and leave a very tiny opening you can create a pinhole that’ll make a tiny bit of your view in focus
Photo from Minute Physics demonstrating what you need to do for that:
I do much the same, make a tube out of my hands like I’m using a monocular. Works!
Been using this trick to read my alarm clock since I was ten!
You could make “glasses” out of wood or bone with thin slits using the same idea
Just like the Inuit snow goggles
Neat! I have really strong vision, but know how to force them out of focus. It’s weird not being able to blur my vision when I’m doing this.
We could rely on scavenging what’s already been made. Even if it isn’t your exact prescription, a little might be better then nothing.
It took centuries to get to disposable contact lenses while trying to figure out the physics, both in optics and in manufacturing any sort of spectacles, at the same time.
Will the survivors of the apocalypse be able to pick up where we left off or will they essentially start from scratch? That depends on the apocalypse and on the survivors. Do documents and knowledge survive, perhaps in a stash or in digital form? Do the survivors include an optician or a material engineer? Chances look good if that’s the case. If no, life will get a lot harder for many people.
Restarting production chains and manufacturing facilities is going to be the biggest bottle neck.
If we imagine something like climate change wiping out 99% of the population, there just aren’t enough people to do all that. It’s going to be all hands on deck just to produce enough food for everyone. It will take a few centuries of rebuilding to get to that point.
for less people you need less manufacturing capacity
That is also true, but low output production doesn’t get the benefits of economies of scale. That means that the number of people we need per amount of stuff produced will be higher if we do things small scale. If we have a city of a million people, you can totally arrange various things in a more centralized way, which brings the benefits of large scale production.
Ever wondered why waste water purification or energy production tends to favor large scale facilities? Same applies to farming wheat, grinding it to flour and baking bread.
If you have only small towns, everyone will just focus on making the basic necessities happen. Who has the time to design new electric motors, when you need to spend your time milking your sheep and harvesting berries for next winter.
You can make a rough magnifying lens by trial and error using glass and a hand grinder—not the same as prescription lenses, but for many it would be better than nothing.
Any glass? Any grinder? Can I find a broken window and start sanding it with sandpaper, as an extreme example?
i feel like there’s some sort of childhood song about the dangers of silicosis we were supposed to learn but praise mandela didn’t
Silicosis sounds so silly!
Some glass is many sheets glued together, that could be trickier to work with
Thick glass that’s not tempered will be the easiest to work with
Pretty much any piece of glass and a series of sandpapers going from low to high grit will eventually work if you know what you’re doing
That’s pretty crazy.
Yes, it’s not magic, it’s just the shape of the glass that makes the focus point of images be slightly closer or further apart.
Can I find a broken window and start sanding it with sandpaper, as an extreme example?
Yes, provided you have a way to polish it back TU transparent again, after changing the shape.
Ohhhh, cool. I knew it was glass, but I guess I did kind of think there was some magic going on in there somewhere. Way simpler than I realized.
Maybe contact lenses are apocalypse proof
Always keep a year supply of dailies on hand
yeah but how much solution you got for stretching those dailies out
It’s just salt water.
